


When We Were Young

by Anonymous



Category: Sally Face (Video Games)
Genre: ...I'll be real just writing this made me sad, Anyway sometimes really all it takes to become friends with someone you hate, As far as I'm concerned Travis and Megan were childhood friends, Canon Child Death, Child Abuse, Depressing fics go to anonymous, I do have an account on here but I swore to myself, I have tested this myself and can confirm., It's 3 AM and I am out of ideas., Like it's not explicitly stated but we've all watched/played the game, Therapeutic., This will never be confirmed, Title has... largely nothing to do with anything., WE KNOW., and REALLY wanted to post it..., and happy fics go to main account., because GOD KNOWS CANON IS DEPRESSING ENOUGH, but I finished this before I finished any of my happy shit, but it will also never occur to Steve to say otherwise, is one good fistfight to clear the air., so I just decided to compromise., so technically nobody can prove I'm WRONG., that the first Sally Face fic I put up was going to be HAPPY, we got a rough idea of what Megan's was like towards the end, we know about Travis's home life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 16:59:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19404409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The Phelps Ministry is the only officially recognized church in Nockfell. If you're Christian adjacent and even mildly observant, your choices are there or the next town over, and frankly the Holmses aren't willing to go to THAT much trouble.As a result, Travis and Megan sort of know each other.They aren't friends, not really.Not at first.





	When We Were Young

They know each other really just by virtue of proximity. 

All the kids born and baptized between 1980 and 1981 are shoved together all the time to make it easier on the group leaders- one age group per area. Travis and Megan grow up seeing each other every week- in nursery school, in Sunday school, in children’s choir and in church, and they manage to know each other both very well and not at all. If you showed Travis a million pictures of a million babies, he’d know which one Megan had been, but if you’d asked him her favorite color or even her last name, he’d have no idea.

(When they were very little, back before the boys and girls learned to hate each other, they used to play together and pretend to be dogs.)

Travis stops playing with her when he turns six and the congregation members who say hello to him after church as he waits in the hall for his dad to put away his robes start referring to her as his girlfriend.

They say it nicely, like they think it’s sweet. He hates it anyway.

The next time they’re all sent out to play and Megan comes over to him like usual as they sort themselves into their default groups, he tells her very shortly that girls and boys can’t be friends and that he doesn’t want to play with her anymore. She looks a bit taken aback as he walks away and forces himself into a group of boys playing with sticks, but she doesn’t protest. They weren’t really close enough for it to be a loss. It’s more like a break in routine.

The other boys are not fun. All they ever want to play is pirates. As Travis whacks somebody over the head with his stick, he decides his pirate is also secretly a dog.

When the boys finally start interacting with the girls again, it’s to antagonize them. Travis isn’t totally sure why they do this, but he doesn’t want to be the only one who won’t, so he does it too. It’s not intentional, but his main target somehow ends up being Megan. 

She just makes it so _easy._ He doesn’t even have to _try_ to upset her. It’s like she’s scared of everything, bugs, loud noises, the dark, spiders, that stain behind the choir room radiator that looks like a face, but she still wanders around with this dumb smile like she’s not even ashamed or upset about it, and he has this overwhelming urge to wipe it off her face. It just makes him so ANGRY, and he’s not even sure why. People should be ashamed of their weaknesses. They should fix them. But she never does anything about it, like there’s nothing wrong with the way she is, and he hates it.

She never does anything about him picking on her either. All she does is ignore him for as long as she can and runs away when she can’t. 

Megan is the biggest pushover he knows, so when she comes to Sunday school one day wearing a necklace, he immediately decides that he’s taking it from her before the day is out. She doesn’t need something that fancy anyway. He’s not sure how to tell, but it looks like it might be actual gold. Who gives a kid real gold? It’s her mom’s own fault that somebody’s going to end up taking it, putting it on her dumb daughter was a dumb idea.

He’s used to taking stuff from Megan without her doing anything more than whining, so when they go to the play area and he yanks the necklace off her neck “Just to see!” he is entirely unprepared for the scream of rage she gives before lunging after him and tackling him to the ground. 

They scrabble in the dirt, clawing and punching and snarling. Megan’s giving as good as she gets, singularly focused on getting that necklace back and away from him, with no qualms about doing as much damage as possible as she does it. As she scratches his face, narrowly missing his eye with her needlelike nails, Travis is shocked to realize he’s actually kind of impressed.

And then suddenly the Sunday school teachers are there, dragging them apart and hollering about _unacceptable behavior_ and _would have expected better_ and _disappointed_ and _parents_ and as Travis feels the sudden stab of fear in his stomach as he imagine his father hearing about this, he recognizes an identical look of terror on Megan’s face.

Their eyes meet.

And then suddenly the dam breaks and he’s frantically trying to get the teachers to listen, insisting that no it was HIS fault, Megan didn’t do anything wrong, while Megan tries to talk over him about how it was HER fault, she should never have hit him, Travis didn’t do anything, and a combined chorus from the two of them of _please, please, please don’t be angry!_

From a few yards away, the other children watch in amazement.

In the end, nobody tells their parents, but Travis and Megan are both put in time out for the rest of the day and have to (with stern help from the high school volunteers from Youth Group) write each other letters of apology.

They sit in the classroom in silence, Megan’s necklace back around her neck, and watch as the other kids play outside. Travis crushes his alphabet cookies one by one and sprinkles them into his apple juice for something to do.

“Why do you have that, anyway?” He finally asks when he runs out of cookies, eyeing the necklace as sunlight winks off the cross. Megan fidgets with it for a moment, almost unconsciously.

“My mommy says it will protect me from the evils of the world.” she says haughtily, and refuses to look at him.

“Oh,” says Travis, looking out the window at the others playing on the swings. “It’s pretty.”

“…thank you.” Megan says, after a moment, then silently slides her own alphabet cookies over to him.

It’s not quite a truce, but it’s something like it.

Over the next year, Megan and Travis become nearly inseparable. If anyone asks if they’re friends they will strictly deny it, but it doesn’t stop them from making mud soup together in the sandbox, drawing on any surface that stays still long enough, and hoarding snacks in the tiny broom closet nobody else uses anymore in the choir room.

The broom closet can fit two small children in relative comfort, and it is claimed almost immediately as a clubhouse. They fill it with snacks and interesting rocks and old beach towels, and when Mr. Holmes has a day where he goes all strange or Pastor Phelps has a sermon where he gets particularly fire and brimestone-y, they hide in there together and carefully talk about absolutely anything else.

Megan is still scared of all sorts of weird things, and Travis is still kind of a jerk, but they learn to work around it. They have… an understanding now.

The day the Holmes family disappears, Travis knows long before they’re officially declared missing that something has gone badly wrong. He doesn’t know what exactly, and he can’t explain why, but he has this sickening feeling that something very bad has happened and whatever it is he’s not going to be able to fix it.

Early the next morning, as he crouches behind the doorway and watches his father staring at the TV news, he learns that he was right.

_Went fishing,_ the reporter says onscreen.

_A mudslide,_ she continues, face solemn.

_Three bodies recovered,_ she finishes, and Pastor Phelps turns the TV off.

As he wanders off towards the kitchen, Travis sits numbly, clutching his knees to his chest, staring at nothing, and thinks of mud, and screams, and how Megan, who couldn’t even handle spiders, who was terrified of the dark, who’d jump whenever somebody slammed a door, must have been so, so scared.

A service is held for the Holmes family that evening.

A lot of people are crying, even people that Travis thinks really didn’t know Megan’s family that well. He wonders, through the fog that seems to have taken up residence in his brain since this morning, extinguishing the panicked, rapid-fire energy from yesterday, if it’s bad that he isn’t.

It’s probably okay. Dad says that men don’t, anyway.

It’s fine.

At the pulpit, Pastor Phelps begins talking about Luke Holmes, describing him as a loving family man. A memory of the terror in Megan’s eyes any time a teacher threatened to talk to her father abruptly cuts through the haze in Travis’s head and he suddenly fiercely, selfishly, wishes that Luke had died somewhere else, alone and away from her.

He’s immediately ashamed and afraid for thinking that. Dad’s always talking about how only God can pass judgement on others, and Travis has a vague sense that God can probably read minds. If he thinks something that awful, God will know and get angry.

But there’s a part of him that thinks it anyway.

The funeral is held a week later. Travis wonders numbly during the days leading up to it if he should ask to go, but is spared from making a decision by coming down with the flu the day before. While Megan Holmes is being laid to rest, Travis Phelps is staring up at the ceiling of his room, trying to figure out, in between doses of medicine, if he ever gave her back that rock she found that looked like a fossil.

That Sunday in Sunday school, the teacher talks to them about heaven.

She talks about how sometimes God, in His infinite wisdom, takes some people to be with Him in heaven sooner than we expect. That we miss them, and that’s okay, but that we should take comfort in knowing that there is always a reason for everything He does, and that those people are in a better place now. That as long as we are good, we will see them again someday, and join them in heaven.

Most of the girls are crying. A few of the boys are too. Travis can feel the high schoolers staring at him reproachfully from the back of the classroom, and thinks, with no real emotion, that it probably seems kind of mean that he isn’t.

Men aren’t supposed to cry.

Do they just never feel like they want to?

When they all go out into the play area, Travis wanders vaguely alongside the fence, thoughts filled with fog. Lately he’s been feeling like his head is stuffed with cotton. Everything feels… weird. Quiet. Muffled. It’s like life is in slow motion and he can’t figure out how to change it back.

He comes to a stop by the gate and sits down, watching the other kids. There’s that same group of boys playing pirates, a couple of girls being horses, and some other people engaged in a halfhearted game of catch. He wonders why nobody ever wants to be dogs.

Something glints at the edge of his vision.

There’s something shiny half buried in the dirt by the gatepost. As Travis digs it out, he discovers it’s a rock, but a familiar one. It’s smooth and polished, looking more like something bought at a museum gift shop than anything found in nature, and it’s almost identical to one that Megan found a month ago not too far from here. Cleaning the dirt off with his sleeve, he shoves the rock in his pocket, takes a quick look around to make sure nobody’s looking, and clambers over the gate, stumbling slightly as he lands on the other side.

He makes a beeline for the choir room. The youth choir should have finished practicing a while ago, and they never remember to lock up. If he’s quick…

Travis makes it to the choir room, checks to make sure there’s no one left from choir practice, and dashes over to the broom clubhouse, flinging the door open before slowing to a halt.

The clubhouse has always been a meld of his and Megan’s personalities, but as he looks, he can see little things that are Megan’s alone. The beach towels wadded up in that one corner she always sits in, because she likes to have a nest. The crayons that she’d brought from home because the ones at Sunday school are all broken. The dried leaves that she taped to the walls last fall and still haven’t quite fallen apart yet. The special rocks she’d collected, carefully lined up and arranged on the lone shelf in the room.

Travis slowly makes his way over to the shelf, examining each rock before pulling out the new one to compare. He knows all the rocks in here. Megan showed him every time she found a new one, telling him all about where they came from and the special powers they might have.

At the very end is the shiny rock that she found last month, glittering in soft gray. Travis places his next to it, wiping off a little more dirt with his thumb. 

They do look alike. Maybe they came from the same place. 

Megan would have been really excited to find out.

The new rock goes clattering to the floor. 

Travis doesn’t move to get it, clenching his trembling hands into fists.

The room is too big.

It’s not a big room, they’d both been thinking it was starting to get a little small lately, but now it’s too big, way too big, big and echoing and empty, and he suddenly feels very small and alone. It’s too big with just one person, it’s too big with just him, there’s supposed to be two people in here but now one of them is gone and she’s never coming back and THE ROOM IS _TOO DAMN BIG._

In a sudden fit of rage, Travis snatches his rock off the floor and throws it as hard as he can against the furthest wall. It hits and shatters upon impact, spraying shards of stone everywhere and leaving a mark in the wood.

Travis glares at it, teeth clenched, breathing hard, and when the tears start to fall he tries to fight them off, snarling, before giving up at last, knees folding as he slumps to the ground and buries his hands in his hair and sobs and screams and shatters like the stupid, stupid rock.


End file.
